-The Tribune The prices of essential food items have increased by 50% in seven years, whereas the real wage rate has risen by 22%. These figures show that inflation has outsmarted the real income of the poor, making their lives miserable as the food basket constitutes a substantial proportion of the total expenditure on the poor. The net effect is that the poor earn less and take loans to maintain the...
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Poor Economics: Has India’s poverty really fallen? -Santosh Mehrotra & Jajati Parida
-Financial Express Dataset and methodological weaknesses cast doubt on recent poverty estimates that claim drastic reduction Bhalla, Bhasin and Virmani in a working paper (IMF), claimed India’s poverty, per a $1.9 per person per day poverty line (at PPP), was 0.9% of the population in 2020. Thanks to government transfer of free rations of 5 kg per person month, it fell to 0.8% (from 0.9% in 2019). Roy and de Velt, for...
More »Civil society members are unhappy with the abysmal rise in notified wage rates for MGNREGA in FY 2022-23
-Joint Press Note released by NREGA Sangharsh Morcha network and People’s Action for Employment Guarantee (PAEG) dated March 31, 2022 The wage rates for NREGA workers for FY 2022-23 were notied on 28.03.2022. The notication of the wage rate has been extremely late, with only 3 days remaining for the beginning of the next nancial year. Such a delay prevents any discussion or debate regarding the wage rates or their adequacy....
More »Reality is stranger than the fad for online education -- most schools lack IT-infrastructure
Online teaching was perhaps the most preferred mode (of the policymakers) for imparting education to school children in the last two years when schools faced closures thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was promoted by both the Central and State Governments when mobility almost came to a standstill (or got restricted in comparison to normal times) during the last two years. However, various studies (a list of those studies is...
More »MGNREGA: Wake-up call -TK Rajalakshmi
-Frontline.in A Parliamentary Standing Committee pulls up the Rural Development Ministry in its report on a “critical evaluation” of the MGNREGA and calls for more investment in the scheme. A Parliamentary Standing Committee report of the Ministry of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj, tabled in February, strongly recommends enhancing the budget for implementation of work under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005, higher wage rates, and increasing the number...
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